Winona State University

When Minnesota achieved statehood in eighteen fifty-eight, one of the first acts of its new legislature was to establish normal schools, institutions specifically designed to train teachers for the frontier classrooms that were multiplying across the state. The legislature chose the city of Winona on the Mississippi River as the location for the first of these schools. What they were founding, though they could not have known it yet, was the first tax-supported teacher-training institution west of the Mississippi River.

Classes began in eighteen sixty, in a city that was itself only a few years old, a booming lumber port at the foot of limestone bluffs on the river's western shore. The school closed for nearly three years during the Civil War as students and faculty left for the army, and when it reopened in November of eighteen sixty-four it resumed its mission with urgency: Minnesota was filling up fast, one-room schoolhouses were going up across the prairie, and someone had to prepare the teachers.

The first permanent building, Main Hall, was completed in eighteen sixty-nine, and the citizens of Winona contributed money and land to help construct it, a striking show of community investment in public education at a time when the city itself was barely a decade old.

For more than a century the institution was known as Winona State College. In nineteen seventy-five it became Winona State University, part of the Minnesota State system. Today it enrolls roughly seven thousand students and occupies a compact campus between the downtown and the bluffs.

What gives the university its particular resonance is its setting. It was founded at the exact moment when the Mississippi River made Winona one of the most important lumber markets in the nation, and the university's entire early history unfolded against the backdrop of a city transforming from a frontier trading post into an industrial center, and then slowly reinventing itself again after the lumber era ended. The school outlasted the industry that surrounded its birth.